Murray J. McAllister, PsyD

Murray J. McAllister, PsyD, is the editor and founder of the Institute for Chronic Pain (ICP). The ICP is an educational and public policy think tank. Its mission is to lead the field in making pain management more empirically supported. Additionally, the ICP provides Academic quality information on chronic pain that is approachable to patients and their families. Dr. McAllister is also the clinical director of pain services for Courage Kenny Rehabilitation Institute (CKRI), part of Allina Health, in Minneapolis, MN. Among other services, CKRI provides chronic pain rehabilitation services on a residential and outpatient basis.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact the world with deaths in the hundreds of thousands and countless more having become ill. To reduce the risk of contagion and death, areas around the world maintain self-quarantining practices and have been doing so now for multiple months.

Sheltering-in-place, or self- quarantining, presents both challenges and opportunities for everyone, including those with persistent, or chronic, pain.

A giant in the field of pain management passed away the other day. It was December 22, 2019, and, to be exact, he was the father of pain management. It is no overestimation to say that he brought pain management into modernity. Ron Melzack, PhD, was 90 years old.

Twenty some odd years ago, the American Academy of Pain Medicine and the American Pain Society, two large pain-related professional organizations, teamed up to agree upon what it means to have both chronic pain and be addicted to opioid pain medications at the same time.1 They did it because addiction to opioid medications when patients are prescribed them for legitimate health reasons seems different than addiction to other substances like alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, or even illegally obtained opioid medications when not used for pain. The difference involves the phenomena of tolerance, physical dependence, and withdrawal, which in part serve as criteria for the diagnosis of addiction when it comes to all other substances.

Readers of the Institute for Chronic Pain website recognize it as a source of trusted and transparent information. The Institute for Chronic Pain aims to bring scientifically accurate information on pain and make it approachable to everyone. In so doing, the findings of scientific research is translated to provide understandable and hopefully helpful information to those with persistent pain and their families.

Fatigue associated with chronic pain

Daytime fatigue1 is commonly reported with chronic pain and can be just as challenging to manage.2 Restorative sleep is undoubtedly important and adhering to the guidelines for sleep restriction and sleep hygiene can improve the quality and often the quantity of sleep. Less well-known are diurnal rhythms, which are independent daytime biological patterns, and how they affect us and how we can affect them. Changing what we do, how and when we do them, can help these invisible hormonal and chemical patterns synchronize and as a result have less fatigue.

Chronic pain rehabilitation programs are a traditional and effective treatment for chronic pain. Such programs are based on cognitive-behavioral principles that aim to change how you experience pain. By doing so, chronic pain rehabilitation programs help you to a) reduce pain and b) return to meaningful life activities even though some level of pain may persist. In other words, by participating in chronic pain rehabilitation, you change your relationship to chronic pain. You no longer perceive pain as an alarming and disabling condition, but develop the know-how to understand your pain as a benign condition that no longer needs to disrupt or prevent your daily life activities.

Wouldn’t it be good to become so competent at dealing with persistent pain that you no longer are disabled by it?

The most vexing of all questions in the debate over long-term opioid management for pain is subtle, difficult to articulate, and rarely considered. It lies at the heart of whether and how we maintain patients with severe pain on long-term opioids or whether we help them learn to self-manage it instead.

This most vexing of questions involves how we understand the nature of pain severity and its relationship to its degree of tolerability in the long-term opioid management patient. For depending on how we understand the intolerability of severe pain, it leads to contradictory treatment considerations among well-meaning, competent patients and providers, and even within the larger society.

A common complaint among people with chronic pain is that their pain has come to occupy too much of everyone’s time, attention or energy. In other words, it can sometimes feel like their pain is the only thing anyone ever talks to them about – that they’ve become almost synonymous with their pain.

We call it pain talk. Pain talk is the persistent verbal focus of everyone’s attention on the pain of someone with persistent pain.

One of the more long-standing recommendations of chronic pain rehabilitation is to reduce pain behaviors. It’s one of the ways that people with persistent pain can learn to cope better with pain. Let’s review how to do it.